The Medium

The Plot Sickens

Behind the grim conflicts of the writers’ strike is a grimmer reality: neither the picketers nor their executive foes can imagine a business without plot-driven narratives. But reality shows and YouTube are killing the Hollywood story.

For almost all the time I’ve been a writer, the highest rank has been to be a scriptwriter. True, this had been against much of the evidence—almost every word that any writer for movies or television has ever written about writing for movies and television is a derisive one. (My current favorite memoir is Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke, by Rob Long, a writer for Cheers—just one in a genre of books by self-loathing scriptwriters.) And yet every young writer, or just young person (you don’t have to be a writer to write scripts—which is part of the attraction of screenwriting), with heart and imagination continues to believe he or she can get to heaven by writing a blockbuster screenplay. I do not mean to sound so contemptuous: I have myself often been lured into the screenplay trap. And while I’ve had no movies made from my scripts, I was once put up in a wildly expensive bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, another time, after too many martinis in an extremely fashionable restaurant, threw up on a producer and his supermodel girlfriend—that’s glamour. For my sins the Writers Guild of America, which provides my health insurance, wants me out on the picket line.

And I intend to go (although not today) because I think the Writers Guild strike, which is theoretically about residual payments relating to electronic distribution—the writers want 2.5 percent of revenues for work that appears online; the studios want to apply the much lower residual rates (0.3 to 0.36 percent) set in 1985 for the nascent home-video market—is really about a more fundamental labor-management conflict: This rotten job, which has taken our youth, is now going away, so we might as well squeeze some last drop of blood out of it.

The current cult of the Hollywood writer begins in the 1970s. This is just as the holy grail of the Great American Novel is fading, and as people who’d made it big in journalism were looking for the next step in their careers. There was a new notion of the movies and the Zeitgeist—the Great American Novel might be dead, but long live the Great American Screenplay—and a legend emerging from the West of unprecedented paydays. If you wanted to tell stories, well, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese—who wrote their own scripts early in their careers—were the greatest storytellers of the age. The story, and its creators, once the lowest level of the movie trade, became, if not the highest, far from the bottom.

Having a screenplay (or just thinking you had one in you) became a currency. Not everybody could make a movie—but everybody could write a movie. It was the easiest way into the movie business, the three-act structure. If you wanted to better yourself in Hollywood—if you were, say, a studio executive’s wife, or a Jamba Juice counterman, or an actor who needed a break, or if your kids went to school with Brad Grey’s kids—you had a script, or understood how important it was to get one. And everybody who didn’t have a script, who realized there were more efficient ways to get a good script than to write one, was looking for scripts. The story was the magic—the concept, the characters, the twists, the reversals that could attract the stars and captivate the audience.

As the world of screenwriting and the race to get the story became more and more competitive, the process of qualifying a script became more standardized—or, really, commodified. The idea was not to write an original script, but to write the same script that everyone else would write. If you could get the formula—and everybody takes the same courses and reads the same how-to books that teach you the formula—you could make it big.

As the script—the story—was the gold, every Hollywood movie became a barbaric struggle for influence over the story. This influence took the form of an elaborate bureaucratic superstructure in which the more powerful you were the more you got to say what the story should be (this is called “giving notes”). Subliterate stars regularly deliver long plot commentaries. Indeed, the guy who has the most power, that accountant or agent or thug who ran the studio (Anthony Pellicano, the actual thug often hired by studio machers to intimidate and eavesdrop on their enemies, was developing his own screenplay), became the ultimate story expert—and true author, or, if not, would claim credit anyway. In fact, getting credit for the story, having the temperament and power base and alacrity to get credit, became, in some sense, the craft of writing. That left the people without the temperament and power base and alacrity, most often the actual writers, on the ash heap (for which privilege the Guild contract now guarantees a minimum of $77,000 for a first draft of an original screenplay and a set of changes).

The other part of the cult of the Hollywood writer involves television and begins in the 1980s. Television writing became a respectable and big-money thing to do starting with Saturday Night Live, the Steven Bochco Hill Street Blues–type dramas, the advent of schedule-supporting blockbuster situation comedies, and the expansion of late-night talk shows. Indeed, Hollywood writers achieved their greatest dominance in television. There have been, for a very long time, no more important figures in television than the writers—not stars or producers. The writer became what is known as the “show-runner,” which meant that he or she was not just the writer but the administrator, the organizer, the boss of other writers—the show-runner controlled the organization that controlled the story (the more successful you become as a writer in Hollywood, the less actual writing you do). The show-runners—Dick Wolf, the creator of Law & Order, Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, and David Chase, of The Sopranos, among them (the Tina Fey character in 30 Rock is a show-runner)—became some of the richest and most powerful people in Hollywood, and, certainly, the richest writers who have ever lived. This happened, however, simultaneously with another trend: a dip in the share of network television, which went from more than 90 percent in 1980 to under 45 percent today, and is projected to bottom out, by many estimates, at under 20 percent. As cheaper reality television has replaced much more expensive scripted shows, this has produced an ever growing population of writers who will never work again—writers who have been trained to write for a medium, network television, that effectively no longer exists.

And that’s who has effectively declared the writers’ strike. Of the 10,500 members of the Writers Guild, nearly half are unemployed. What they are fighting over is the future value of the stories that have already been written—that’s what’s going to support these unemployed people, the residual value of Dharma and Greg. What they want most precisely is to rejig the agreement that came out of the 1988 strike to include forms, then not imagined, of electronic distribution so that they might participate in a windfall if Dharma and Greg becomes an Internet craze.

That punch line is the point: The business isn’t cool, it’s pathetic. The Hollywood writers are on strike because of the sense, shared by just about everyone in Hollywood, that the business, even the Hollywood lifestyle, is undergoing some radical downsizing—so grab what’s left.

You would be hard-pressed to find business relationships more full of bitterness, bile, and backstabbing than the ones among the various parties to any agreement in Hollywood. Indeed, everybody has been willing to put up with such abusiveness (unlike in a standard industrial relationship, there is no one class of abuser—at some point everyone is abused) because the movies have conferred a status and a promise worth the abuse.

But how much does the labor-management, abuser-abusee relationship change if the glamour goes away?

What happens if the value of the story keeps going down?

And it is going down. Cheap production technology, no-barrier-to-entry distribution, and a Niagara of “product” (65,000 new videos are uploaded on YouTube daily) mean the entire Hollywood story-development complex is now in a daily competition with do-it-yourself writers.

Hollywood product itself is remade, reduced to clips, bites, fractals, and mixes. Sitting through an entire feature film more and more feels like an unreasonable commitment. (We use DVRs to fast-forward, to pause, to hold for some other time—anything not to have to watch something from beginning to end.) The narrative is disposable.

Video games, whose 2007 receipts of $8.7 billion rival Hollywood’s $9.7 billion box-office take, are anarchically unplotted. And while Hollywood is getting larger and larger fees from licensing its characters (born of those tortured three acts) for video games, the more video games become the entertainment model, the less patience my son and his friends will invariably have for conventional story lines.

Not only is reality TV a network solution for lowering costs, but it works too because it busts scripted, plotted formulas.

Movies as displays of visual virtuosity more and more become pure technology plays. The Zeitgeist is expressed through engineering (most of which is not created in Hollywood), not through the story.

If you don’t have story, that great collaboration of writers, re-writers, directors, producers, agents, executives, publicists, managers, stars, and the retinues—however painful and abusive and exploitive that process might be—do you have Hollywood?

The most out-of-it people I’ve ever spoken to about technology are Hollywood people. One of my frequent jobs is to moderate panels at media conferences where entertainment executives try to talk sagely about the new media. They know nothing. This is partly because Hollywood is a surprisingly old industry—dominated by the over-60 set. And partly because it’s Hollywood—and Hollywood is hipper and sexier than those ugly people in Silicon Valley, isn’t it? And because in Hollywood they’re obsessed with stories—and technology can’t produce a better plotline, can it? And because everybody in Hollywood has reams of personal assistants who insulate them from technology. (Also, there has never been a Hollywood movie about the technology business, and people in Hollywood are interested only in what’s in the movies.) But this does not mean that they don’t know that something big is happening—they know what technology is doing to their colleagues in the music industry (it has stolen their business away). Even if they have no idea about what this big thing might be, can’t they jockey for position when it comes? They may not know about technology, but they sure know about jockeying for position.

Hence, the current argument about who gets what when it comes to electronic distribution. The writers think the studio people are going to slip out the back with what’s not nailed down; the studio people think that the writers, because they’re writers and have nothing to lose anyway (a union of unemployed people has little reason not to go on strike), are quite willing to have the whole house collapse. What’s more, studios are increasingly aware that the Internet is filled with writers—or, if not writers, some new creative species—working for cheap. But, at the same time, nobody, writers or executives, remotely has an idea about how to do what they do, how to apply their trade—creating these elaborate, hoary, three-act or four-act divided-at-the-midpoint stories—in a new form with a new means of distribution for an audience that seems more and more to want some radically different thing.

The epochal point is that Hollywood, which has been the center of the culture, the coolest place, the ruler of the Zeitgeist, is out of it. It’s on the industrial sidelines. It’s just a bunch of crabby managers and a sullen workforce in a dysfunctional relationship in a declining industry, quarreling over an ever smaller piece of the pie.